1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to shopping over a computer network and, more particularly, to shopping over the Internet where a computer program system helps shoppers select and purchase one or more groups of products from different online network sites, e.g., online stores while satisfying various preference and budget constraints.
2. Background Description
Commerce over networks, particularly e-commerce over the Internet, has increased significantly over the past few years. Part of e-commerce enables users and shoppers to access information of products and to purchase them from various commercial Web sites (i.e., online stores). There are numerous online stores currently operating in the Internet including. Amazon.com, eToys.com, Buy.com, Wal-Mart.com, Sears.com, LLBean.com, Gap.com, Macys.com, JCPenny,com, Eddiebauer.com, and Onsale.com. These online stores provide various customer services to make commerce activities possible over Web sites. Some of the examples of the basic services are online catalogs of merchandise which are both browsable and searchable by various product attributes (e.g., keyword, name, manufacturer, and model number), shopping carts, and checkout process. Some online stores also provide advanced customer services such as product recommendations, wish list, gift registries, gift finders, gift-click, gift certificates, calendars, custom-configuration of products, express checkout buyer's groups, chatting, e-mail notification, and in-context sales.
Web based retailing (e-tailing) has to date largely tried to mimic the business model used by brick-and-mortar retailers. As a consequence, cyber shopping using web catalog has been restricted to traditional “shopping basket” models. Such a business does not fundamentally exploit the information technology infrastructure that becomes available with Web based shopping. For example, although a potential user might be interested in different shirts and four pants, he might finally want to choose two shirts and two pants that fall within a budget constraint. Similarly, when gift shopping for friends and family during the Christmas season, a shopper might identify, based on attribute preference categories, a set of items but desire to identify one gift item per person based on budget constraints. The traditional shopping cart-based approach is not sensitive to a user's preference structures.
The present invention relates to shopping over the Internet where a computer program product helps shoppers select and purchase one or more groups of products from one or more online stores. The computer program product generates a list of recommended products while taking into account different types of constraints on the products including budget, product category, inter-item and multiple choice constraints, as well as possible optimization criteria such as retailer preferences. Such a computer program product can be useful in many occasions in life, including when a shopper purchases gifts for one or more people, say, friends and relatives, for a holiday, when a shopper purchases a number of school and education-related materials during a back-to-school season, when a student shopper purchases a number of books in the beginning of a semester, when a home owner purchases materials for remodeling part of his or her home, say, a kitchen, when an office manager periodically, say, one a month, buys various office supplies for his or her office, and when a restaurant manager orders food materials for his or her restaurant.
While consumers have occasions to purchase a group of products from time to time, purchasing groups of products at a time for an operation or a project is a norm for business buyers. A computer program product which generates a list of recommended products optimized for a given set of constraints will provide such bundle buyers with a new shopping experience that saves them both time and cost, and improves their satisfaction. A computer program product which recommends a group of products optimized for a given set of constraints is currently not available in existing online stores in the Internet. Some online stores provides several shopping tools for selecting and buying one or more products such as wish lists, gift registries, gift-finders, and gift-click. How these shopping tools work and how they are different from the present invention is summarized below.
A wish list is a shopping tool available in a number of online stores including Amazon.com, Eddiebauer.com, and Sears.com. A shopper can create a wish list in online store and record information on products he or she wants to buy from the store in the list. The store keeps the product information for a definite period of time, e.g., a year. The shopper can access the list anytime and make one or more transactions for purchasing one or more products stored in the list. Some online stores such as Amazon.com extend their shopping cart service to provide the wish list capability to some degree. However, such shopping carts store the product information for a shorter period of time, e.g., ninety days. A wish list helps its users purchase a product bundle at one time from an online store. It is different from the present invention because it requires the users to choose a list of products to buy, and does not select a list of products optimized for various constraints such as budget and product preferences.
A gift registry is another popular shopping tool provided by several online stores including Macys.com, and JCPenny.com. A user (or a group of users, e.g., a marrying couple) can create a gift registry account for a special occasion such as wedding, anniversary, pregnancy, holiday, birthday, or graduation in an online store and collect a list of products the user wants to receive as gifts. Other people (e.g., the gift registry owner's friends and relatives) can access the gift registry list by using the owner's personal information such as owner's name(s) and occasion date, examine products stored in the list, and purchase one or more products in the list for the owner. A gift registry helps its users obtain a group of products for a special occasion, but it is different from the present invention primarily because it requires the user to choose a list of products to buy. A gift registry does not select products optimized for various constraints though it may provide the users with some information useful for the selection. Also, it requires the users, friends and relatives to access the registries and purchase one or more products on the list.
A gift finder is another shopping tool provided by online stores such as Eddiebauer.com. A gift finder is a parametric search program customized for selecting gifts. That is, a gift finder provides users with a set of parameters (e.g., gift recipient's sex and age, occasion, and price range), and their possible values (e.g., wedding, birthday, or anniversary for the occasion parameter). A user can select values for one or more of the given parameters to find products of interest available in the online store. A gift finder can be used to select a group of products which possibly satisfy the selected values for the given parameters. Unlike the present invention, however, a gift finder require the parameter values set for each gift product, and so it requires multiple searches to select a group of products. Also gift finders usually come with only a small number of parameters which generally fit in various types of occasions, and so they can hardly cover diverse constraints of individual shopping cases.
A gift-click is a new shopping tool served by Amazon.com. When a user finds in an online store a product which he or she wants to send as a gift to a person he or she knows, the user purchases the product and provides the person's e-mail address to the store. Then the store contacts the person via e- mail to arrange delivery, i.e., confirm if the person intend to accept the gift, find the person's mailing address and send out the gift. This tool helps the user send gifts to other people, but it does not help shoppers select a group of products optimized for a set of given constraints.
Another prior art area for this invention is constraint-based configuration programming which was recently developed from the field of artificial intelligence. Constraint-based configuration provides a rich representation for expressing relationships and constraints between objects, as well as efficient techniques for constraint propagation and enumeration of solutions. Constraint-based configuration technology allows the online product catalog to be represented declaratively by a hierarchy of dynamic classes, each corresponding to a product type. For each item choice, the input profile specifies a possible domain, or list of items in the product catalog which can match this profile. Constraint-based optimization provides fast and efficient algorithms for generating lists of recommended products for each item choice which satisfy all the shopping list constraints.